


Blind Hearts

by crazyfish



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bromance, College, Developing Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Gay Male Character, Male Friendship, Male Slash, Mother-Son Relationship, Multi, Oral Sex, Platonic Male/Male Relationships, Poker, Romance, Sexual Content, Unrequited Love, ukrainian character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-08 16:49:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazyfish/pseuds/crazyfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex is lost in love with his straight best friend. Graduation looms, and he despairs of losing him. He hooks up with the sexy stoic Dimov, all in good meaningless fun. But unlucky for Alex, Dimov is a man who bites and never lets go. While Alex likes his quiet reserve, he still can't find the courage to release his old love and take the chance with him. Who will shed love on his blind heart?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Grand Prize

The casino was a riot of iniquity: laughing, tinkling, groaning, drinking, and then the zings of slots machines and the riffling of cards. At the poker table blessed with light and the shine of a perky dealer, three men were hard and dim over their duo of cards.

It was nine p.m., and the pot stood at four thousand dollars. The dealer turned the fourth street.

At the early position, a player twirled a chip with his left fingers against the velvet-lined table. A triangular patch of chest hair peeked from the opening of his Hawaiian shirt. Between the silvery-blue shades hiding his eyes and the tumbler touching his lips, no expression is evident on his face.

His fingers began to move four chips towards to the pile of chips for the pot, but the first player clockwise from the dealer spoke up, “Sorry, I never got your name.”

The fingers slackened over the green felt of the table. “Chris,” he put down his tumbler, “you, Alex right?”

“You remember mine … now I feel bad.”

Chris shrugged, but tiredness still crinkled his eyes. “Don’t sweat it, Kiddo. I’m good with names and faces.” Stalagmite teeth hinted from behind the slight smile.

“When I do win the pot, I’ll be sure to thank you with a blowjob.”

Chris’s lips collapsed into a frown.

“I raise,” Chris said, words and actions like ice blocks.

Alex smiled but ended with an irrepressible yawn. He stretched out his arms up into the air, bone layered over bone; exhaustion would seem to thread upwards to the coffered ceiling. His smooth cheeks were flushed with some color, and his eyes livened with the polished whiteness of dolomites.

Alex, lips holding back a smile, motioned to the second player. “We’ve been playing for what eight hours now? And I never did catch your name.”

“Because you’re an idiot, that’s why,” Chris interrupted.

Alex popped back, not fazed by the affront, while the second player matched the bet without comment. The long hours had yet to mark him. His mouth was just as firm, his cheeks just as rough and lax with pockmarks and the eyes, pointed and hoary.

A school of women shambled across the floor like a school of strutting geese. Amid their squawking and squealing about how not amazing the fondue had been, the second player deigned to return Alex’s amiable stare.

He replied, with an accent thick and gunky, “Dimov, Dimov Krym.”

Alex nodded to himself approvingly. “Russian, I like it.”

“Ukrainian.”

“Same thing.”

“Blowhards think like that all the time.”

Tense but intrigued, Alex bit his lower lip. “I’m just a stupid American. Africa is one giant country. Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and whatever-the fuck-istan is all Mother Russia.”

“Idiot, speak for yourself.” Chris’s face was a desert map of red and pink.

The dealer cautioned, “Gentlemen…”

Alex played with a chip and grimaced over the community cards. “I prefer being an idiot. I think it’s less arrogant than being a blowhard. What do you think, Dimov?

Dimov turned modestly toward the black and glittery dealer and chuckled.

“There!” Alex said in wonderment, “It must be his lucky night.”

“Are you going to play or something?” Chris demanded.

“The idiot needs to think first. Luck doesn’t seem to be on my side today.”

“That remains to be seen,” replied Dimov.

“Ooh, you’re looking forward to my blowjobs. I should think harder.”

“I might, but my wife won’t like it.”

“So you find another. Some women like to watch,” Alex said.

“Why would I marry her then?”

“Can we get on with this?” Chris pleaded.

“I think I’m entitled to negotiate with the kind and polite Mr. Krym from … Russia,” Alex said.

Dimov glared fully and furiously at Alex, who was licking his lips in an evident anticipation of something. A sure win, a childish dare, a befuddled prattle of boy on the brink of a loss? No one had answers, and answers could not be divined, and the minutes built up a tense cage of locked stares.

Alex broke away, tossed his chip in the air, caught with a twinkle in his eyes. “I call.”

“All your yammering for calling?” Chris guzzled from his tumbler, slammed the glass with a sandy exhale from his mouth. “We’ll see what you’re made off, Kiddo, I raise.”

Dimov called. Alex called as well. The dealer turned the fifth street. Chris took a quick glance at the ace of diamonds, and raised. Dimov raised. Alex called.

It was back to Chris looking blearily over his dwindling ledge of chips. “Let’s get this baby into orbit. I raise.”

Dimov raised. Alex leaned back in his chair, moped over his modest mountain of chips, then with a resigned nod of the head, he said, “I raise.”

Chris’s face had sagged to a pale mush. The amount he would need to match Alex’s bet was more or less equal to the number of chips he had. He drank again, this time slowly. His little finger trembled against the table imperceptibly.

“Fold,” Chris announced manfully, and without pausing for the men to gesture sympathy, he huffed away towards the green tinkling fountain.

“Just you and me, now Mr. Russia,” Alex said. “For your wife’s sake, I hope I don’t win.”

Dimov said, “You sound more interested in … than winning …” he visually estimated the chips in the pot. “Winning seven thousand dollars.”

“Seven thousand three hundred dollars.”

Dimov mimed to himself in concession to his superior estimating skills. Alex added, more sultry than before, “Money can’t buy everything. You need to bargain for everything else.”

Dimov popped up at him, his lips tightening and bunching to the left. He turned to the dealer then it was show down.

Alex’s fingers tightened over his thin cards before revealing them. Dimov exhaled an exhausted breath and said, “You win,” then flipped over his cards. The dealer concurred.

Dimov extended his arm across to the table to shake Alex’s. “Congratulations.” Dimov’s tone managed to be warm and cordial; Alex managed to leave behind his bravado with a quivering smile.

“I’ll be enjoying this alone then?” Alex asked, searching.

Dimov’s hand was firm, and the handshake seemed to last longer than it should. But both men measured each other, and it would seem that the scales, where they may be, were found wanting, inadequate, amidst the gathering din of the hall.

With a dismissive eye-roll, Dimov pulled back first and smoothed over his ear like he was trying to recover something. “Don’t spend it all one in place. Never too young to start saving.” And without haste, he arose, the table and chair rumbling. His shoulders spanned wide like long horns and looked packed tight. Momentarily, a thick shadow loomed vertically over the table, like a bright palm tree.

Alex, his fingers caressing the corrugated surface of a chip, watched Dimov nod again, amiable, reluctant, then turned away towards the horizontal gleam of the lobby. Alex gripped the chip. A shudder worked through his sternum; quavering began apace. It was like watching a sun eclipse and seeing ahead the dark closing in.

New players were hovering over the table, giving Alex steely looks so that he would pack up his chips and vamoose. But Alex took his time opening his bag pack, dropping one chip after another, glancing over the irate faces to the suited back of Dimov, who was slithering around the poker tables. Alex clucked and shoved all his chips into his bag and tramped away to the popping line of slot machines. A drink might do him good; perhaps roll him of the edge of anticipation. Did he have time for it? Alex checked his phone for the time: nine thirty. With a crick in his neck, he realized all the free alcohol he refused during his eight hours at the table. Maybe he should join a table just for a free drink? But the time—he really ought to pack up or he would not make it back home before dawn.

A victorious yell of “Yess!” alerted him to the squat man at a slot machine pumping a fat arm into the air. Even with the gleeful clinks of coins streaming out of the machine, he could not suppress the pebble of disgust forming in his belly. He conceded the luck of the idiot winning perhaps enough for a better-looking toupee. But he prided himself a careful gambler ever watchful of the odds, not another zoned-out monkey who thinks pulling levers is equivalent to skill. And these odds he felt shifting in his favor as he looked over to the mosaic of poker tables, the dull spectators sipping from tumblers, and the lone man without a glass—Dimov tall and grave. And where the odds blew, Alex followed.

Another man, shaved balding head, rose ears and rose cheeks, hailed down Dimov, who first grunted tiredly and then slid to a prim smile. Dimov’s effortless amity impelled Alex to pause.

“Dimi,” the man swooned. “Are you done now?” Dimov neighed affirmation. He reached over his neck and fixed his collar then pointed him to a trio of smiling men by an abstract statue. “Now time for us to go dancing with those Argentinians over there. Gracious me, sexy Spanish, sexy pecs. Two for me, one for you. ”

Dimov flustered but did nothing as the man unbuttoned his collar. “Make that three for you and zero for me. I’m tired, Charley.” He slammed his palms over his eyes and heaved a breath.

Charles dimmed. “Are you going spend the weekend playing serious poker, or we all going to have fun?”

Dimov flew red on the cheeks. “I got carried away.” Charles rolled his eyes. Dimov scrambled to regain the high ground. “I lost the game, but I’m up for the day. More money for you and Glenda to spend…”

“Ugh. Remind me never to come along with you to Vegas again.”

“Look, you have another two months before you move to Philly. We still time to come back to Vegas,” Dimov said consolingly, but Charles was making irreverent faces at the Latin trio. Dimov shifted abruptly. “Where’s Glenda?”

“Stalking Hello Handsome.”

Dimov’s eyes widened, as he expected nothing less from Glenda. He yawned again. “I’ll go back to the room and freshen up a bit, and I’ll rejoin you and your friends back here.”

Charles’ brow zoomed inward and creased in the middle of his forehead. “Good. Sounds like a plan.” Before Dimov could walk away, Charley held back him by the arm and said, like a naughty child, “What’s the room number?”

“Where’s your key card?”

“Somewhere in the lockers or the bottom of the pool”

“You—If they charge us for that, you’re paying.” Dimov leaned his hand on Charles’s shoulder for a moment, and moaned, “443—don’t bring your friends into the room.”

Charles smirked mischievously. “What about our long planned three-way … four-way?”

The words took their slow effect on Dimov staring carefully into the glassy hazel of Charles’s eyes. “Maybe when you’re less bald.”

“You’re getting bald too.”

Dimov glared at him. “No, I’m not.”

“Yes, Dimi,” Charley stroking Dimov's widow’s peak, “there, you getting bald. A shame losing hair before you’re thirty,” he ended victoriously. “Pedro doesn’t mind bald. I asked him for you—”

Dimov took control of the hands and brushed them aside. “This isn’t funny.”

“I agree getting bald isn’t funny.”

“Joking about n-ways with you isn’t funny.”

The moment between the two friends was suddenly fraught with perilous crags. Charles stepped back, brushing the imaginary lint off his striped polo shirt.

“You’re tired. You should go to bed early. We’ll do something tomorrow.”

“I’m not—Just tell her to be absolutely sober when she gets back.”

The two men went their separate ways, Dimov plodded to the glittering row of elevators, Charles danced up to Latin Trio, Bossa Nova or Tango on his mind. Alex, however, had been watching the conversation with the amusement one gets when you discover that your five-year-old parrot can swear. The last eight hours had him sit against Dimov’s etched presence, his no-nonsense demeanor, and then this unexpected boon of a gentle Dimov.

Smirking, Alex swayed lazily to where he could cash his chips. The darling fruits of luck was on his mind, not the squiggly trail woven into the carpet, a fibrous maze, less art and more blindingly psychedelic. He thought it was now or never. But before he could dream up a slick plan, his phone rang.

He grimaced at its hot-white screen and answered hurriedly as he marched to the elevators. “Frank, I almost done here. I just need to cash my chips, and we’re good to go.” He tsk-ed about Dimov.

“I’m fuck-all tired. I don’t think we should leave tonight.”

Alex looked around the diarrheic glimmer spiraling over the elevator doors. “I only agreed to come with you to Vegas if I could get back before Sunday Morning. I have the Monday interview to prepare for.” His senses narrowed as he imagined his mother sitting alone in the scouring dark of the living room. “I need to get home early.”

A depressing sigh came over the phone. “How did you do?”

“Up. Everyone else?”

“I and Tom are up. Janet doubled her bankroll. She announced she’s quitting poker. Too much testosterone bullshit, she said.”

Alex clenched a fist into the air. “You two should make up already and getting fucking. I like her around. I can't handle you and Tom alone.”

“Don’t blame me. I did nothing. I said nothing while she was grinding a greaseball. Go shake Tom."

“But you—how did the retard do?”

“Pete’s drunk off his mind. Lost three-quarters of his bankroll.”

Alex gritted his teeth. “Next time, your friend doesn’t get to come along.”

“Roger that. But Tom wants to buy hookers and Pete is real stoked. I think L.A. might have to wait till the morning.”

“What the hell I am supposed to do when you guys are paying too much for plastic titties?”

“Talk to Janet about shoes, Darling.”

“Fuck you too.” Alex rubbed his sore eyes and glimpsed Dimov disappearing in the elevators. “And you wonder why Janet doesn’t want to play anymore. I veto this idea.”

“I’m not so keen on the idea either. I get better pussy spending ten bucks on cheap." Alex sneered, Frank continued, “You’re welcome to look at my limp dick, while Janet talks to you about shoes.”

“Don’t you fucking wish.” There was vague guffawing over the phone. Alex groaned. “We can’t get legal hookers in Vegas anyway. We’ll have to stop somewhere on the way home. It all works out as long as you don’t buy hookers while Janet is around.”

“Roger… She shouldn’t mind us three playing with fireworks.”

“No shit, fireworks?” Alex could not help smiling. “That sounds like a fucking plan.”

The plan was tentative, and Alex felt grateful that the world was not crashing down on him yet as he cashed his chips. Money heavy in his bag pack, he installed himself in the corner of an elevator, glazing over the LCD glow of floor numbers ticking to the flow of his thoughts. The money meant nothing. It was a game, a serious game of risk management. The money was evidence of a job well done, and now it would go back into his gambling bank account to be played with later.

The doors opened to the swirly rose of the faux granite hallway, and Alex's mind flashed with Dimov, his big wide face, the wide big shoulders, and the goose-pimpled neck and the hefty Adam’s apple. Alex stepped back into the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor.


	2. The Graces of the Universe

"We are going to Vegas," Charles had demanded majestically, and before Dimov could waffle about the cost and inconvenience, Charles booked the Premier Aurora room with double queen beds (What nonsense about separate rooms). However, their roommate, Glenda, hovered sulkily around them, lamenting the Universe’s bad graces in denying her a chorus part at the LA Opera. Charles, grunting of his good graces much grander than the Universe’s, demanded she come along. And there remained the perplexing problem of two beds, three people (Goodness, who will sleep with whom?). That was easily solved. The Universe be praised. One king-sized bed, three people, and a lovely old time.

Dimov spent day one of the Vegas outing indoors on the poker floor. Now he was alone in the hotel room, unbuttoning his shirt, slugging across the grainy carpet. The bold linked motifs on the floor, he thought and would never say to Charles, repellant, as well as the bold green and cream swathes over the walls. The bed, admittedly, looked kingly and promised dreamy sleep among the starry sheets, but with three to a bed and Glenda’s guttural snoring, dreamy sleep felt like drunken boxing in a sleeping bag.

The air conditioning kicked up a gear of lethargic activity. Dimov fell into the bed, into the grey shimmery sheets, and thought it better to claim the good hours of lonely sleep rather than return sheepishly to Charles. He might have to apologize about his grouchiness earlier. But why should he? He put his weekend on hold and—something itched in his throat; stray cords splintered in his chest—and Charles was leaving for Phila-fucking-delphia.

In his heart opened the creaky door to a stairwell descending into the dank, musty dark. It jarred and shocked him to bounding to bedtime plans. But there was a knock, a strong double knock that augured unrest.

“You lied about the wife,” Alex announced himself.

Dimov’s hands hardened over the door handle. Alex leaned in, returned Dimov’s narrow grizzly glare with a pawky grin. The elevators dinged, murmurs surfaced from the beyond the hallway, and then their silence of apprehensive stares. As if to concede, Alex straightened back but his hand brushed lazily over his fly and up the excruciating roughness of his baseball jacket to his wet lips.

“I overheard you and … Charley,” he said.

“It’s poker. Everyone lies. Everyone makes false promises.”

“I don’t make false promises.” Alex looked over Dimov’s thinning lips and down the island of his chest peeking from the half-unbuttoned shirt, and then ruminated on the belt and its tight looking buckle. He glided back to Dimov’s eyes, still hard, still blank.

Alex defaulted to easiness. “Let me buy you a drink.”

“I don’t drink.”

“You lying again?”

“Dimi!” Dimov saw Charles calling all way from the elevators, and the full-bodied Glenda in a velvet tracksuit shuffled heavily from behind him.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” she said, smiling like she was onto a secret stash of bonbons.

Charles’ eyes flicked between Alex’s red hair and Dimov’s tightening face.

Dimov blurted, “He was about to le—”

Alex leaned forward and extended his arm to Glenda. “Alex. Nice to meet you. Dimov invited me over for a drink.”

“A drink?” Charles dialed his hazel eyes onto Alex’s reddening face, but before he could say anything, Glenda corralled Alex’s arm and pulled him inside the room.

“You, my dear, are really special. Dimov’s a bad, bad Russian. Drinks only on special occasions.”

“Ukrainian,” Dimov emphasized and then settled himself on an armchair and began buttoning up his shirt with particular sourness.

Unmindful of Dimov’s cloudiness, Charles dropped himself by Dimov’s and inserted himself rather jerkily on the Dimov’s armrest. Dimov kept by his stoniness while Charles had warm but worried look in his eyes as he stroked the short tufts of Dimov’s hair. “The bulky manly Ukrainian who burnt his suit.” He was cutting.

Dimov colored and suppressed the bead of a memory of his first meeting with Charles, the room service boy. Then he had been, as Charles would say, a twenty-one year old with a frowning problem. If he must, he could dredge up the sepia aura of the hotel room, or the image of the carbon-hard gauze embossed on the suit breast pocket, or the alienating New York skyline, dark and discomforting, or that he had an eight AM interview at a finance firm the next day.

If Dimov must remember, he would remember; but these days, the exuberant can-do Charles with hair of stiff peaks was all he could conjure of that night. The man had saved him, and now the man was leaving him. Dimov cradled his head and the hurt simmering in it.

Charles moved his head about like cat playing with a spool of yarn. He caught Dimov’s eye and motioned slyly to Alex feeling the softness of the bed, “You managed a cute one.” Dimov sank back in his chair, tense with hurt. But Charles, still unmindful, gave a final ruffle of Dimov’s hair before moving off the chair for his suitcase on the bed.

Unengaged on the bed, Alex began rubbing his knuckle against his lips like he would rather be stroking something else. The wall mirror beside him was reflecting a single bed and its ruffles and folds of ruined sheets, Charles, prancing about the bed, undecided over the glimmering grey shirt or the glimmering black shirt and Glenda laying out her makeup case from her suitcase.

“The universe is so good and amazing today,” she frittered with glee then flurried into the bathroom to change. With the door bang still ringing, Dimov looked over to Charles to explain what good news of no significance he had missed.

Charles cooed, “She got herself a opera audition for the Orange County opera.”

“Orange County?” Alex bristled with an urge to divulge his personal details.

But before Charles could answer, Glenda emerged again, the frills of her blouse generous over her bosom, a lipstick like a baton in her left hand. The moment became pregnant with compliments that should be said.

“Oh dear, please take a seat. We’ll be out of you boys’ way in no time.” She towed Alex away from the mirror and sat him at the corner of the bed closest to Dimov.

While Charles disappeared into the bathroom, her woody flowery scent blossomed in the space between them. Dimov kept his eye on Charles still indecisive over shirts. Alex crossed his legs, smiling and whittling away under the spectacles of Glenda’s twinkling eyes.

“So,” she began, applying lipstick while watching herself in the mirror, “Where you from, Sunshine?”

“Los Angeles,” Alex said.

“Really? Amazing how the Universe is good and amazing today. We all live in a West Hollywood. Dimov’s our kind and benevolent landlord.”

“Kind … I need proof of that.” Alex gave Dimov a daring smirk.

“Posh! Dimov’s a squeeze.” She rubbed her lips to smear tamarind-red lipstick. “Just talk about poker and pot odds and see him squee like a girl.”

“Dimov squeeing like a girl, that’s something to see.” Alex nodded knowingly.

With Glenda’s face to the mirror, Alex was amused with Dimov persevering in his flinty air, rolling his lips at the closed bathroom door. Then Charles came out of the bathroom looking quite squat in a sequined green shirt.

“What exactly is that?” Dimov asked coldly.

“It makes a statement.”

“I like it,” Glenda chirped.

Charles shifted onto Alex, eyes swimmingly curious. It was not quite clear if he was waiting for his approval, but he threw his head back to Dimov. “What happened to being tired and hated a four-way?”

Dimov’s mouth hardened at the corners. “We are not—”

“Glenda,” Alex interrupted, “I live in Irvine, actually. Going to graduate from UCI in a few months.”

“Irvine?” Charles settled on the glimmering gray shirt on the bed and just before he entered bathroom to change, he said, “Cars are more important than people over there.”

“It’s not that bad. Good Chinese food nearby. Lots and lots of parking space … Not bad.”

“Parking space, the one good thing about Irvine.” Charles had changed into the grey shirt but looked vaguely satisfied over his slightly plump belly. “I liked the green shirt.”

“And you may wear what you want,” Dimov growled tiredly. “Would you all of you get going? I’m going to bed.”

“Oh not yet,” Alex quipped.

Charles pushed forward excitedly, like an ever-grateful grandmother, took hold of Alex hand and shook it gleefully. “Yes, please punish him for me.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Dimov tsk-ed. He persevered his stares straight ahead at the tiled shine emanating from the open bathroom. The room felt damp and hot even with the low groan of the air conditioning. Perhaps it was the hot air about the good graces of the Universe to blame, Dimov did not deign to ask. It was enough trouble finding the right label for the intruder.

Money did strange things to people. Cry when they meant to laugh. Laugh when they meant to frown, curse, cheat, praise. Money didn’t bring Alex in here? Alex looked unpolished, relaxed enough in his baseball jacket; nothing seemed artificial about him, except perhaps his forwardness, which Dimov, now scrutinizing the face that was in desperate need of a shave, decided he did not care for.

Glenda chirped, “Alex make him come dancing.”

“All of you, just go already.” With that Dimov admitted to himself that he was tense, and about nothing important either. Worrying if your opponent had just made a flush draw was a more important and a better reason to feel nervous.

Alex, again with the honest eyes, headed him the tight smile known to neer-do-wells. Dimov looked away too quickly, quite liked to see Glenda calmly strapping on her pumps but the tension rilling his pores, tunneling through his veins was still unpleasant. There was just one way to deal with it: buckling the winner punk underneath him and doing what he alone wanted.

“Lady, you take too long.” Charles pulled Glenda off the bed, hooked his arm into hers, and dragged her to the door. The door shut quietly but firmly, and then the room and its walls enclosing wood-stained hues swelled wide and wobbled in Dimov’s eyes, enforcing a tight sense of pressure.

Back straight, hands in his jacket pockets, Alex grinned valiantly. “Your tenants look like fun to control.”

“They pay the rent eventually.” Dimov calculated the precise cut the intruder needed. “Alex, you are—”

Alex jumped up from the bed and gathered his bag pack. “It’s getting late.”

Folding a knee to himself, Dimov loosened, a little relieved, a little grateful. But Alex sidled up to his armrest, causing his pulse to flare, but upon seeing the sleeved arm extend to him for handshake, Dimov perspired coldly under his arms.

“It was fun meeting up close in person,” Alex said.

The handshake was secure and firm, like what Dimov thought of Charles on their first meeting, secure, firm, like Alex’s smile unzipping a ledge of yellowed whites. Alex made for the door. The incandescent light filtered over the cropped curls like truncated snail shells of auburn hair. His baseball jacket puffed at the waist, giving an unflattering short impression of his height. Dimov estimated perhaps he could be one head shorter than him. And in thinking about it blandly, he had not been accurately aware of Alex all along. The boy was ebullient, forthright, but nothing physical of him piqued in his awareness.

“I should offer you a drink …” Dimov shifted in his chair and surveyed the disorder of opened suitcases on the bed. “Charley has vodka around here somewhere to annoy me.”

Alex refrained from opening the door, but Dimov did not expect the face, again, like at the poker table, assured of its seventy three hundred windfall, or the pounding strides across the room and back to his feet. Eyes cool and insistent, Alex knelt before him; Dimov was instantly drained of all feeling. Kick away, move into the eyes? Alex reached for his waist, and suddenly, Dimov held back the hand strongly, catching Alex with a sneer. Alex strove against the brace, driving Dimov to grip him by his nape and pull back his face.

“You’re cocky, you know that?”

Dimov wanted to end it and say “and that’s why I don’t like you,” but the upward profile of the neck glistening with sweat, open view of the tongue soft and steaming and the eyes glaring even in surrender … the kiss was a collision, long anticipated, yet unstoppable. Teeth hit against teeth, tongue lanced against tongue. His vehemence, his contempt at losing against him twice now, Dimov forced it down his throat. Alex’s hands were palming his tightening hardness, and he let go and let him taste his victory.

It was strange, frightening, exhilarating. The room had become a shattered mirror of images, the dark-stained headboard, the glazed blankness of the television, the all-too-white sheen from the bathroom door ajar. It was his luck, perhaps his bad luck because Charles and Glenda would gibber about it ceaselessly; and luck that could not be managed with money, luck all the same that gifted him the hands impatiently zipping his fly. Space seeped into a blur, but the door handle shone like a beacon in the gathering mist of the room. His fingers tingled brightly as a wet warmth slipped over him. The whorls of auburn hair on Alex’s head sliding in and out, in and out. Dimov held back a smile at Alex’s mouth full of him, thick with him, lovely, efficient, desperately efficient. To stop from buckling, he gripped the armrests, and still the hungry slurping noises encouraging him to rock away.

An ache grew wild down the edge of his tailbone. Dimov clasped the damp head, ground his teeth down the floor of his mouth. Then it came on a flood and drowned him beneath the lake of his own undoing.

Alex looked back at him, rabid, a pearl dotting the corner of lips; and Dimov was overcome with need. Without hesitation, he shifted down onto the floor and pulled Alex to himself. Alex was furious with his erection, Dimov furious with kisses down the line of his neck. He buried his nose into the nook of his ear, the salty sweat, the cheap soap, the smells cascading. With an airy grunt, Alex convulsed back into the nook of his shoulder and then lacteal trail seeping into jeans fabric of his lap.

A moment rested with waning breaths and heartbeats. Alex turned dreamily into his cold damp cheek. “Thanks, Baby. But you really didn’t have to.”

Baby? Dimov inwardly bristled, reminding himself that this was a one-time only happenstance.

“Shit.” Alex forced his vibrating cellphone from his pocket and answered quickly. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be there, I’ll be there … we’re still leaving tonight.”

Cellphone held in between ear and shoulder, Alex hopped about madly to zip up his fly then picked up Glenda’s lipstick on the bed and scribbled his number on the mirror hanging. The great red “Call me! Got to go,” rattled with the eventual door bang.

The soft lamp light bathing his perspiring cheek, Dimov was left with the overwhelming sense of having seen a whirlwind uproot trees, collide vehicles, and yet leaving him unscathed. He still did not like Alex, and even so chaos tore within. Chaos and need.


	3. Friends and lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex gets back home to Irvine and has some sad down time.

Alex would say definitively that Frank was short—just to piss him off mostly—anything to get Frank’s auburn eyes to arc a hard and pretty left was always a win. In middle school, Alex tried to console Frank about his height with a tale of the little emperor Napoleon Bonaparte rampaging through Europe, to which Frank replied, “Who’s Napoleon?” And that was the start of a friendship. 

Several times, Alex thought he would never get to see Frank’s horrid bowl haircut again, like on the last day of their sophomore year of high school when Alex blurted he was gay. He could still remember the sensation of pebbles rumbling in his throat as he floated away from the lobby and lost himself in the parking lot. He had thought the reveal would lead to a long exhausting summer, and hopefully in the fall, Frank would have gotten over hatred and settled into a cool disregard. But three weeks into the summer at Manhattan Beach, he ran into Frank, sporting a surfboard, a bronze hard torso, and a girl in a swimsuit made of strings.

Frank’s cheeks rounded into fleshy rumps, and his eyes sparked lively and exciting, as he crowed about his new girl, his new pecs, his surfboard. All the while, Alex was gulping down boulders. The girl skipped ahead into the waves, and there proceeded a distinct changed in Frank’s mien. A hand went to chin, setting up a stance for a serious pose—this Alex always found ridiculous from the wannabe Napoleon. 

Frank had asked, “So, who’s looking hot this summer?”

Alex thought it was another Frank’s miserable jokes, but there was his eyes drilling him down. Frank complained, “Fuck, I tell you everything, and I know nothing about you.” Alex softened enough to give a list of jocks, to which Frank exclaimed. “God, you’re cliché. Is there guy you have a real chance of fucking?”

“You only want to nail porn stars and women who are too tall for you,” Alex retorted.

“Sandy,” Frank pointed the girl kneeling into the water, “Is shorter than me… Give me someone real here. Fuck, I even told you about the fat chick I wanted to nail in seventh grade. Why did I fucking tell you that again?” Why indeed? 

Alex remembered his body buoyed lighter with every roar of the ocean waves, its rolling chariot of foam, and Sandy, askew in it, slanted into it, delighted with it, and then the half smile on Frank’s face and his realization that by the summer’s end, Frank was so not going to get to third base with Sandy. He knew Frank. His ridiculous goals, like how he wanted to ride every bus on the LA metro. The incessant preening on his bicep width and his perfect commanding look like Napoleon. And the refining and ruminating on the machine specs of a bottle rocket. He knew Frank. How his black hair would bunch up around his large ears. Or the triple of prominent pimples on his left cheek that never would never go away despite Frank’s concoction of potions.

Frank said, “Some guy came onto me the other day in the gym. Looked a little like you.”

“Great, all gay men looked like me now.”

“He was a red head, and all curly hair like yours,” His voice was balled up in defensive hurt. “But taller, bigger, and a smarmy greasy fuck.”

“So what if it had been me?” Alex blurted.

Alex remembered not waiting for a reply, perhaps walking away furiously, he couldn’t not recall. But he did remember feeling as if he were swimming on the sand, the sand itching his toes, his fingers grimy with the dusty sand, and he growling rabidly against the idea of a beach.

But Frank flagged him down, stopped in front him, his eyes quivering. “Wait, you don’t—”

“Of course not!” 

Later, Alex begged his parents to spend the rest of summer with his grandparents in Phoenix. He claimed the 110 degree heat would be good for his moral fiber.

And now, they had just arrived from Vegas, parked in front of the black pole of Alex’s mailbox. It was twelve noon, exhaustingly and depressingly late for Alex, but Frank did not give a fuck. The radio was pouring verses about bitches and hoes. Alex stole a glance at Frank’s hair still black and limp over the ears and the veined forearm crowning the steering wheel. They were still together, at least for the next nine weeks. Straggling down again those worn steps of gloom, Alex proceeded to count the money to pay for his share of the travel expenses.

There was a tired groan from Frank. “I can’t believe you held us up for dick.”

A delightful look spread over Alex’s face, already a rose of warmth. Dimov, tall, hard and tense at his armchair came back to him, his mien, tight, stony, but with occasional twists of hurt. He had stolen the pot from him, unnerved him, felt him up, and left him panting. Alex was smiling rashly now. “I couldn’t pass up someone taller than you

Throwing his head back, Frank scoffed. “Was I the only one who didn’t get laid this weekend?”

“Pro’lly,” Alex said, still absentminded, “You and Janet.” There was a low sigh from Frank, and in it the languorous tones, the dramatic history of the on and off again Frank and Janet. 

Frank snorted, grimaced. Fringes of hair covered messily over his eyes. “Fuck what did I do? How’s it still my fault after four months?” Frank hissed through clenched teeth. “I think she’s seeing someone anyway.”

Alex counted again the wad of a hundred dollar bills. “Don’t care. Don’t give a fuck. Just make up with her already.”

“Christ! You’re the manwhore, but I’m the bad guy.”

Alex raised cold eyes to him. “I’m not sleeping with your friends.”

“The fuck does it matter anyway?” Frank pumped on the steering wheel. “We are graduating. Janet says something about Korea … Korea, what the fuck is in Korea? And Tom and Pete are—”

“Really don’t want to hear about Tom and Pete.” The memory of Pete’s whiny drunken voice ruffled Alex so much he forgot how much money he had counted. “They don’t get to say shit about you because of me.”

Frank laughed, looking away from Alex. “I don’t give a shit. And so you shouldn’t.”

Alex’s stare roved over Frank’s chest, a solid slab in royal blue cotton, tall against his seat, and up to the eyes dimming, seeking his acquiescence. Sometimes, Alex thought, there was one last hidden lever to pull, one more knob to push before Frank would lean over and press his forehead against his. Maybe. There was an indistinct groan from him or Frank. Letting dreams go, Alex handed over the bills to Frank who promptly waved it back to him.

“I got this,” Frank said.

“Aww, if only I could flash my titties for you …”

“Think of it as my good luck to your interview tomorrow.”

“Ooh thanks. I’m gunning for this one.” Alex was gathering his bag pack now. “It’s ideal, close by in Santa Monica.”

“This the boutique trading firm in Santa Monica? What happened to Wall Street?”

Cascading down the flights of remonstrations, Alex wrestled with straps of his bag while his eyes were roaming from mailbox to mailbox in the cul de sac. His hands slackened when he noticed the sea blue trashcan behind a parked car in his garage. Guilt rushed in with the vague thought that his mother, Susan, may have stayed home all weekend. He brooded. “I prefer the sun, fake titties and fake pecs.”

“You have to get wake up at what? Three or four in the morning to trade on New York time?”

“This isn’t a finance job. That interview is in another few weeks. This one is some big data gig. Data mining, machine learning and shit.”

Frank drew back with a hum of puzzlement. “I don’t get it.”

Alex opened the door hurriedly, refusing to glean concern or worry from Frank’s tone. It could be mean anything, and everything, but an invisible line corralled their friendship and kept it alive, tense, fun, secure. To look for signs or something more would destroy the tender shoot of it. Alex waved him off, and soon the flashy red cocoon of the German import car was at the end of the street, and then panic, expanding and sweeping, wracked up his spine.

They would be graduating. Frank would be off to the land of dumb blondes and high rollers, and he would be stuck in Irvine. Frank, yeah Frank. Through sentiments of pathetic loss, Alex directed himself and found himself at his mailbox, hoping for an empty hull. His senses circled distressingly with the whorls of colorful junkmail packed tightly in the mailbox. Why had he been hopeful at all? Of course, Susan had not left home all weekend, possibly all week.

She had taken over a corner of the living room, limp upon a paisley-upholstered sofa, like an old decaying oak. Her eyes were pinched small behind narrow glasses as she struggled with a needle through a patchwork quilt. Alex dumped his bag pack on adjacent couch, and already his mind was tearing apart over things he shouldn’t have done. He shouldn’t have angrily agreed to go Vegas just because Frank’s phone call kept interrupting Steve blowing him. Definitely shouldn’t have insisted with Dimov if it meant returning home twelve hours too late.

Eventually in the barrage of shoulda’s, woulda’s, coulda’s, Alex’s cheeks and fingers relaxed, his pose straightened a little taller, but his eyes still looked bleary.

“You said, you’d be back last night,” she said, not looking up.

“Yeah. Things happened.” He could explain Dimov, but she would frown on his loose ways. Maybe explain roaming the nether regions of Nevada to buy for fireworks at one in the morning, and then roaming again for the whorehouse that would satisfy Pete’s particular specifications of ‘young but not too young looking. Cute, but good hips. No yellow teeth.’ And then the fight that ensued when Janet demanded Tom and Pete choose between hookers and fireworks, but not both. And Pete grumbling that Frank preferred to spend a couple hundred dollars on fireworks instead of hookers, and Tom insinuating that it was because Frank was faggy hot on Alex. Alex blowing up and calling him a deranged dickhead was unfortunate, as was Janet whining about too much testosterone for her poor nerves.

But Alex would dare explain that to Susan? There would be nothing for her to approve of, much less laugh at.

“How much money did you lose?” she asked.

“I won a bunch.”

“And then you go right and lose another bunch next time.” She fought with a needle into the quilt, her lips tightened. “You’d follow Frank right off the edge of a cliff.”

Alex held his breadth a moment and then sat on the coffee table across from her. “Mom, I’d follow a boy with dimples off a cliff, not Frank.” Alex raised a section of the quilt and could appreciate its intricateness even though he could not understand what would possess anyone to waste time poking holes and needling threads.

“While I was having fun winning money, what did you do?” Alex asked.

“Having fun not wasting money.”

Alex thought he should be more polite. “How was the art festival?”

“Got a blinding headache, had to pass”

Alex struggled to not to stir at her “headaches.” Something was definitely wrong with her. Perhaps lupus or fibromyalgia, but a thousand visits to doctors could not ascertain. And in the mean time, she was getting heavier, looking puffier, his fingers and toes looking more edematous, life slowly was squeezing out of her. Alex blamed the divorce four years ago, but it was hard to keep believing that.

Alex dropped the quilt and looked into the revolting sterility of the kitchen.

“Have you had breakfast yet? I’m feeling rich enough to get us brunch.”

“Thanks, but I have to finish this.” Red hair tinted with grey pasted her damp temple, lending her the look of a tired hen. “These finance jobs you’re interviewing for … can’t you find something more productive?” Her voice rose, leaving Alex low and ruffled.

“I could say the same thing to you being unproductive. Instead of sitting alone, cooped up in the dark, why don’t you go out and run soup kitchens?” Her eyes shriveled tight behind her spectacles. Already guilt was puckering at Alex. He went for a gentler tone. “We’ve gone through this about productivity. You won’t be having that nice pension if not for the liquidity that—”

“You wanted to apply to med school. What happened to do that?”

“I changed my mind. Can’t I change my mind?”

“Look here Frederick …”

Alex bent his head over his knees and prepared for the lecture that always followed his mother’s croons of ‘Frederick.”

“Frank’s family is old money. His grandfather was rich, his father is rich and he will be rich. You won’t be like him. You’ll be never like him. So why are you letting yourself get mixed up in his crazy ideas? He can afford to be careless and stupid about money and career choices. You can’t. You certainly can’t afford to be as debauched as he is.” Susan took a moment to rub her eyes. “You’re smart. You’re own person. You should do what brings value to you and to others.”

Alex remembered his father sitting right where his mother was sitting, giving another kind of lecture, the man lecture, the lecture about his responsibility to keep house safe and strong, how no amount of gay preening would change that, how he should listen to his mother because she understood more than he would ever know. He also remembered few months later judging his father a hypocrital twat who divorced his mother for a young, but admittedly lovely girl. Now his mother, he looked to the eyes that was his eyes, and the hair that was his hair … the woman who birthed him didn’t understand a bone in his body.

He straightened up and armed himself with a smile. “I hear you, Mom. This interview isn’t for a finance job. More computer sciency. And it’s based in Santa Monica too, so I don’t have to move. Commuting’s a bit of a stretch though.”

She looked adoringly at the trapezoidal shapes puckering the quilt, and a smile was curving her lips now. “Well then.”

Alex nodded. “I was going to make some eggs, you want some?”

“Wouldn’t mind a bite of yours.”

Alex palmed her knee affectionately. “Eggs coming up.”

The kitchen looked revoltingly sterile, the enamel white of the stove, the silvery shine of the sink and the tiles smoothly blue, and the floors cold and clean. Alex did not want to think that Susan may have not eaten for a couple days. He concentrated on milky froth of the eggs, the gritty gold of the butter clarifying in the frying pan then checked impatiently the messages on his cellphones. Some lovers, some study mates, Janet apologizing for being a bitch the other day. Dimov had not called. But of course Dimov would not call him back, and that was all right with him. He had got what he wanted out of the encounter: cost-free sex, the opportunity to see hard-seeming man fall flat and hard, and finally a sense of control, albeit fleeting, some control over the freewheeling cage of his life.


	4. Behave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So Dimov and Charley are at the bar...

The one annoying thing about being the non-drinker was being the default designated driver. There was Charles dragging Dimov off from the dinner table and towing him into his bedroom, and proclaiming, “Up, up, we’re going drinking.” Before he could scurry back to scrutinizing resumes on his laptop, Charles was flying through his drawers for the good shirt, the tight slacks, sending a zap of alarm through Dimov about the clothes askew on the floor. But Charles would not be refused.

On the way to the venue, Charles drove distractedly, engaging with dramatic turns and sudden stops, continually tapping buttons on the radio board. He slowed down before a neon façade of a bar. “And here. Pedro and his friends should be here.”

“The Argentinians from Vegas?”

“Yes! Can you believe our luck? The Universe works in mysterious ways.”

Apparently whatever happens in Vegas, doesn’t stay in Vegas. Dimov slid lower and lower in his seat, unable to shield himself against a drizzle of doom. 

The Friday night crowd spilled out in the front patio. Dimov’s nerves grew tight as He stepped into the ordure of cologne, howls for the non-shitty beer, the eyes dilated and glassy. Instinctively his stares whirled over the fuzzy outlines of heads for the security of Charles’ skin-cut head, but the man had disappeared into the haze of bodies. Suddenly around him, the bar deepened into a lair of bestial loneliness. He wiped his forehead soothingly, and containing a jitter in his pulse, counted breaths to calm. He could do this, he assured himself, he could play the game like he had done so atavistically when he used to live in New York.

Something crawled in the small of his back, and the woody tones of a hated cologne tickled from his left. He, smiling, leaned into it and said, “Where are these friends?”

Charles inflated rather plump with ease and grabbed his arm like a little child leading a parent.

“Pedro’s been wondering about you.”

“I haven’t.” Dimov did not doubt the wondering was of a concupiscent nature.

“Behave, would you?”

For the next half hour, Dimov thought he was well-behaved before the holy three from Argentina: Pedro, Joaquin, Miguel—glossy, ruddy-faced, twenty-five old cherubim fallen out of heaven, for reasons Dimov divined sourly, of enjoying themselves too much with the lyre and harp.

Dimov was sipping through his first seltzer, Charles had ordered his fourth vodka gimlet. Seated in between Joaquin and Miguel, Charles looked like a silvery bald mannequin under the filtered lights above their booth. Inebriation had expanded redly over his cheeks, and then he planted his pleasant peach face into Joaquin’s blunt nose.

“Can you believe it?” Charles hiccupped. “I need glasses. How the hell does that happen?”

Now that, Dimov knew nothing about, but Charles had a way of blabbering about everything else but his most worrisome concern.

Charles pushed into Joaquin, quite mournfully. “Look at my eyes, you think they are bad?”

Joaquin pecked him abruptly on the chin. “Non, Cariño. Perfecto.” Not to be outdone, Miguel commandeered Charles’ face and planted his long one on the mouth. And there commenced the kissing tag between the three of them, to which in response, Dimov scurried away his gaze only to run headlong into the rheumy stare of Pedro beside him. He could appreciate the clean, angular look of Pedro’s face but not now. And he abandoned himself to blinking blandly over the bubbles nucleating over the length of the black straw in his tumbler.

Avoiding Pedro, Dimov planted his critical attentions to the booth across from their table. Over there a woman, with earrings long and white over her satined shoulders, was wailing about the Universe and its injustices to someone as smart and pretty as she. “I’m a really good person. Believe me, really believe me, I’m not a slut. Honest…” she slobbered over her female confidante musing over the bleeding rim of her martini glass.

Then something warm and heavy crowded over his shoulder, he turned back to see disappointingly Pedro’s face squashed with a rakish smile. A rise of indignation cracked through his skull, quite possibly ruining his face because Pedro bent away, squealing in boyish laughter and rapid-firing in lilting Spanish to Joaquin across from him. Apparently something about himself must have been fascinating. Dimov did not care to be buoyed to raillery as something was still cooking under his skull. Pedro, shining, sweaty, laughing, bent over Dimov again, and tried to pour some of his gin into his seltzer. Behave, Dimov groaned silently, behave, as he swiped his glass away before the splash hit, and then good-naturedly letting Pedro to feel the length of his fingers, the wave of hairs over his forearm.

“Which UC are you three attending again?” Dimov asked, mostly to take his mind of the circling softness on his hand.

“UCLA. Business course only for one year,” Pedro said.

Charles pushed forward from the Joaquin’s hand smoothing over his skin cut. “Dimi, the college boy, we met in Vegas, he was going to UCLA too?”

Dimov tasted the salt on his tongue. “Irvine.” But Charles was not paying attention, instead poring over Miguel’s lips.

Dimov turned warily to Pedro commanding his arm now. “So what do you think about America so far?” 

Pedro lifted pinched eyes to him, and Dimov felt intimately the stupidity of his question.

“Your first time, male or female?” Pedro asked teasingly.

Dimov shifted, fumed on the temerity of it, sought a parity of concern from Charles, but the man was still lovingly festooned with play kisses, and that pain cooking under his skull now was barreling down his spine, then he rethought his umbrage. Maybe the question wasn’t inappropriate. It was just something to melt the evening, yes the evening still raucous with the lady’s rising clinks of “I’m a good person, why won’t he love me?” To which gods should he pray to for a quick denouement?

Dimov ejected, “Female. Senior year of high school. We’re supposed to be a studying a calculus midterm.” The image of Sylvia’s bouffant hair, her viciously red lips rather sharpened the edge in his tone.

Pedro retreated to his drink with an air of deep, unrecoverable hurt. A few of moments of silent surliness turned Dimov over, then he moved into Pedro, knees brushed against each other. “But I can’t get enough—” Dimov slipped his hand into the darkness underneath the table. Pedro drank again, this time with a burst of energy so grand that liquid splashed over his clean jaw. And when the wet cheek was against his, the lips tingly and corroded with gin were against his, he sighed into the inevitable and warned himself to behave.

***

Unfortunately Dimov did not stay well-behaved. After he had driven them all back from West Hollywood to Pedro’s place in Westwood, he abandoned Charles to the fate of three horny men and went home to play online poker through the rest of the night. On Sunday morning, as he waded groggily in his sleep shorts to the kitchen, his mind turned tiredly on whether he had been a dick to Pedro. The boy was a good kisser. Then his thoughts dissolved away as soon as he started the complicated sequences of buttons on the coffeemaker. He could see outside the window the rectangular tops of the apartment buildings and the dusty red rung of balconies.

The coffeemaker made its final belches, and a nutty, roasting scent pricked Dimov with a sense of purpose for the day. Placing a cup under its nozzle, he noted with insouciance that Charles’s departure to Philadelphia would lead to a healthier coffee budget in the coming months. Strange how the man cursed his darling coffeemaker a steel carcass that shat mud. These moments of the dramatic and the kitshy, Dimov rolled his eyes at the cartoon drawing of cat’s face on his mug, had a way of blunting a man’s ego. He could still remember the laughter shambling out in the living room, a sort of conspiratorial “hear, hear” against him, those people who had drank his wine, ate his turkey, leaked grease over the kitchen linoleum. 

And Charles, hip against the oven door, in those stupidly short short whose contours gave him an exact measurement, and the chest bare and hairy under a waistcoat, still bled more insults against his coffeemaker. Yes, Charles was drunk. It could be excused, but he should still have called him a common-kissing bitch. He refrained, nursed the copper flooding his mouth, and gingerly offered tea. 

And now with the kitchen trembling in the light, and the lawnmower gnawing so hungrily outside, Dimov could see with the clarity afforded by three years of brooding that Charles wouldn’t have been the least put off if he had called him a bitch. Part of being common was the privilege of asserting non-offence at banal inhumanity.

Two months before that ghastly thanksgiving, Charles had called him from New York, ostensibly to mother away his idiot child ways, but Dimov got a barrage of lisped-tinged ire on the phone, “Dick move, switching jobs and moving to LA without telling me.”

Fighting a heartburn rilling his gullet, Dimov smiled affirmatively at the couple who absolutely loved the idea of a forest of grey lamp posts. Charles, optimistic cat Charles, accepted his vague noises as apology. But he was not prepared when Charles demanded, “When are you inviting me over?”

Dimov took a few moments to wave the couple goodbye and then suffered a few hard moments of cringing. “I don’t know if—”

“You didn’t believe it when I said I loved you, did you?”

Dimov sighed. Charles again being common. He loved you, your brother, your uncle, the cut of the coat, your Chihuahua, your hat, you red tie, your mom, your sister, your mud-pie refried beans. He loved you, and he would embrace the strung out dopehead as deeply as his night lay. Dimov felt again like the idiot child who burnt his suit.

“You’re fucking sore at me,” Charles attacked.

“Please—”

“Give me a date. Pay the plane ticket because I’m a little short on money. Set the time, and let’s fuck.”

Dimov’s hand holding up the cell phone fell limp against his chest. Twilight was shading around the outlines of the flat rooftops, and the happy sounds singing among the lamp posts rose thrillingly in a praise for art, for bulbous lampheads like glowing frogs, for the cool but steadfast preserve of love. What a racket.

Two months later Charles invaded his space with his cabal from New York for the ghastly thanksgiving. Sex was gladly and shrewdly off the table. His face plumply pink, Charles sported a moustache, he boasted it the result of a bet. Dimov grunted along with the rousing agreement that it was great seeing old friends ago. And then thanksgiving dinner, the insults to his coffeemaker and the drunken slurring insistence that he was lonely in Los Angeles.

There’s the thing, this loneliness being seen as crime, a moral failing, and you must do something about it. Get stoned, get drunk, get fucked, if all that failed, you must do yourself and everyone else a favor and jump off a building preferably out of sight from those who could possibly know you. Dimov wanted to bellow proudly the majesty of the Siberian tundra in his soul and defend his right to be the sad little human being. It was his claim, his entitlement after all Charles had refused to do something about it not one year earlier.

But he did not say that to Charles smoothing his temples and uttering more indulgent worries about his lonely Los Angeles condo. How could he? The common Charles had him wrapped in the tightest strings of disorder, a sweet, cuttingly sour disorder.

And now, the lawnmower was sputtering bullets, disturbing Dimov from his reverie. He helped himself to coffee and more sentiments of helplessness before the crick and crunk at the door alerted him to shape up and look passably stoic. There rushed in the whiff of stale cologne and something plastic and rubbery. Charles, in Friday’s green sequined shirt and black slacks, lumbered to the kitchen.

“Oh great, coffee.” Charles took Dimov’s cup for his own.

Dimov wanted to say something, but he made ready the three spoons of sugars that Charles would need.

“How was your night?” Charles asked.

“Not as interesting as yours.”

“I know that. At least tell me a story. An explosion? You tackled a robber and it ended in a wrestling march that had a great happy ending…”

Dimov eyed him strangely, slid into nodding as if he understood what pebbles were inside Charles’ head, then waited for the coffee maker to belch its way to magic.

“Went to the art walk downtown with Kenny and Patrick,” Dimov groaned.

Looking sufficiently chastised, Charles sipped on his coffee.

Dimov thought the coffee took too long and looked over his left wrist for the time, but his wrist was bare. He droned, “What time is it, anyway?”

“I dunno.”

They looked around the many digital clock dials in the kitchen: on the microwave, the coffeemaker, even the damn dishwasher. 

“Nine thirty,” Charles said. “Glenda still asleep?”

“Yes she is—” Dimov scurried out of the kitchen and pounded on Glenda’s door. After a few moments, a disheveled Glenda in satin pajamas opened. Angry, sleepy, and not amused she was, until he said, “You have an audition at half past ten, don’t you?”

“Shit. Fuck me.” Glenda banged her head against the edge of the door. “Fuck me. I’m late for it, fuck me.”

“You say that one more time, I’m giving Dimi the go ahead to do just that,” Charles called out from the kitchen.

“Fuck you. Fuck me, I’m late. The universe has turned on me today.”

Dimov dramatically twirled her away from the door and manhandled her to the bathroom. “The Universe, I assure you, does not think about you, me or anybody.” He installed her in front for of the bathroom sink, shook her gently. “You still have time.” He left her alone and shut the door.

He went back to the kitchen and looked over his darling expresso machine on juddering on the cusp of delivering brown gold.

“Pedro said he wanted to see the desert bloom at Joshua Tree,” Charles said.

Dimov shrugged, retrieved a small cup from the dishwasher, thinking not kindly about Charles getting hard to every syllable of Italianate Spanish from his Argentinian friends.

“I think we should all make it a trip, You, me, Glenda and Pedro and his friends. In two weeks say…”

“I’m busy that weekend.”

“Doing what?”

“Busy. I was planning go fishing at the Hustler Casino. Then go with Winifred to the Hollywood Cemetery that night. They are showing All about Eve.”

“You go fishing almost every weekend. And you can watch the movie anytime you want. And I’m leaving L.A in five weeks anyway.”

“Winifred doesn’t like getting stiffed.”

“Bring her along camping.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

Eyes glaring straight and wild at Dimov, Charles slurped on the coffee. And then coffee. But Glenda came to kitchen, looking oddly presentable in a corset blouse and tight jeans. Charles took the cup of coffee from Dimov and handed it to her.

“Drink that and wake up already.”

“The Universe is telling me something ominous. It does not bode well for me today.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Charles smoothed her curls over her temples. “No excuses, my dear.” He slapped her butt, ripping her a shiver. “Now go and win that audition.”

“Yessir.” And she was out the door with Dimov’s coffee.

Dimov turned on the coffee machine and began opening compartments and secret chambers to remove the coffee grounds.

“You have a problem with Pedro and his friends?” Charles asked.

“Dear, no. They’re great company.”

“But you ditched Pedro. He was feeling bad at it too.”

Dimov grunted at Charles being so commonly concerned, but Charles persisted. “And you were tight all night long in the bar too.”

“You were sozzled. How would you know what I was feeling all night?” Dimov blurted, immediately regretted his loss of control but the rumble in back of his throat was pressing. “You dragged me there, and you know I don’t like drinking.”

“Except with College Boy.”

“What College Boy?”

“The red-haired we met in Vegas when we were all supposed to spend time together.”

“Alex?”

Charles scratched his scruffy jaw impatiently, glaring at him. Chastened, Dimov fell back into the counter and tried to recreate mentally the precise red of Alex’s eyelashes.

“What about Alex?” Dimov said, “I told you, he gave me a blowjob, I jerked him off, and I thought he was cocky. I don't even have his number. Now what exactly is the problem?”

“With College boy? Nothing. You say he’s cocky. I say you’re a hard ass. But that’s nothing new. I don’t care. But I do care that you seem to have a problem with my friends, you won’t come out and say it.”

“You’re reading tea leaves and coming up stupid.”

Charles calmly finished the contents of his cup, walked by Dimov to wash the cup then hang it on the dish rack. His large hands dripping wet, he glowered back to the dull Dimov.

“And what now?” Dimov growled.

“You’re giving me the poker face.” A smile appeared on his thin lips then he slid to Dimov’s front, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. Dimov’s heart dithered a start. “I’m going to bed. Wake me when you’re less pissy.”

The lazy, slapping footfalls of Charles out of sight, Dimov clenched a fist over the warm metal top of the coffeemaker. The plan to go fishing at the casino he deemed ill-advised because he was too ‘pissy’ to think straight. ‘Pissy,’ that could be the word for it, but he preferred ‘terrified.’

Coffee, right coffee. He took the same mug that Charles had washed and poured himself another cup. Bitter, biting, scalding was the sip, and the vortex of the past seven years he had known Charles. He scoffed at the sadness, the loneliness, and the wrath, the heart-rendering wrath that had been his inner coat of skin. It was pathetic, and there was something he could do about 'pathetic.'


End file.
